Hero-U Project Update #102

The response to Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption has been great so far! We have a Positive rating on Steam, 4.5/5 stars on GOG.com, and an excellent 7.9 user rating so far on Metacritic. The extra time we put into testing and getting the game right is paying off.

This post will update you on the most frequent and important issues that have been raised by backers and other players.

On the same BackerKit page, in addition to your game key, you can directly download the technical manual and the student handbook. As we complete other game books – the Yearbook, Art Book, Bestiary, and Soundtrack Album, we will add these to the BackerKit downloads of backers who ordered them.

If your email has changed and you no longer have access to the original one, use Kickstarter to contact me. Give me your name, old email, and current email. If I can find matching accounts on Kickstarter and BackerKit, I can change the BackerKit email. You will be notified by BackerKit when I do that.

Survey and GOG key requests – I sent the GOG part of the survey to BackerKit on Tuesday, and everyone who requested a GOG key by that time has received it. I’ve received several hundred more surveys since then, and will have to manually add GOG keys for everyone who filled out the survey after the first two days. I’ll check it about once a week since this will be tricky and time-consuming. If you requested a GOG key and don’t yet have one, please be patient.

Art Book – GOG Concept Art

Other Publications and Goods Still in Production

As mentioned in the previous update, most of the physical goods are not ready yet. We plan to mail all of the posters next month after we verify printer proofs of them. The boxed games, yearbooks, and other physical goods will be mailed this Fall, likely around the beginning of November.

We’ve already shipped all of the t-shirts, caps, and “Meeps,” as well as key rings from this 2012 campaign that are not part of a boxed game order. I still have about 100 Meeps, and extra t-shirts and caps – see the “I Want Things…” section below.

For logistical reasons, we plan to do Yearbook autographs on separate bookplates and mail them with the books. That way we don’t need to move thousands of pounds of books between two locations. Physical fulfillment will be done by Geekify.

Some digital goods are also still in the pipeline. We need to completely redo the Yearbook layout (we have finished all the pictures and text for it), so that will take time. We are very far along with the Art Book, which is going to be amazing. We’ve also made good progress on the Bestiary that was announced in the 2015 campaign as an add-on. We have all the tracks for the soundtrack album, but need to compile them into a pleasing sequence.

We’ve had a few requests for a hint book. We haven’t done any work on one (or put much thought into it) yet, but it is something we might do once we have all the other promised items in production.

As mentioned in the first section, each time we complete one of these publications, we will upload it to your BackerKit DIgital Rewards and announce it in a Kickstarter update.

Bestiary – Warrior Gog

How to Get More – Coming Soon

Kickstarter is great for funding creative projects, but it isn’t a store. Steam and GOG.com are great for fulfilling games, but I don’t know if they handle game-related items. That leaves our web site (www.hero-u.com) or possibly a service such as Amazon or etsy.

We plan to reopen a store page through hero-u.com to allow both digital and physical orders not covered by Steam, GOG, or Humble. So far I’ve been mailing packages myself; we may be able to work with Geekify to ship them in the future.

The Hero-U Store will also include some items such as meep toys, t-shirts, and caps that we have left over from fulfilling campaign pledges – we ordered extras for promotions and to get quantity price breaks.

Fixing Stuttery Graphics

Some players have reported problems with Shawn’s movement in the game or with the opening cinematic sequence. Most, but not all of these, have been players with very high-resolution displays or playing the game under Linux.

Fortunately, a player came up with a technical solution and posted it on Facebook. Here are the details:

I have found a fix for the slow mouse movement and choppy and stuttery animations and very slow and glitchy character movement you may be experiencing while playing Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption. These are caused by a problem outside of the game.

Misconceptions:

It has nothing to do with resolution.

It has nothing to do with bad code.

Steam overlay is not causing this.

Everything is caused by NVIDIA G-SYNC and high refresh rates!

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WINDOWS 10 FIX – NVIDIA GFX CARD

Right click the desktop click ” NVIDIA Control Panel “

Under ” Display ” tab click on ” Change resolution “

Change ” Refresh rate ” to 60Hz.

Scroll down and hit apply and accept all popup window prompts.

Under ” Display ” tab click on ” Set up G-SYNC “

Untick the enable G-SYNC tickbox

Scroll down and hit apply and accept all popup window prompts.

PLAY THE GAME! Select any resolution you like on the pre-boot screen.

Once you are done playing you can change these back to your desired settings.

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WINDOWS 10 – RADEON FIX:

Right click the desktop click ” Display settings “

Scroll down on the Display tab and click on ” Advanced display settings “

Change the ” Screen refresh rate to ” 60 Hertz ” and hit apply, accept all prompts if there are any.

PLAY THE GAME! Select any resolution you like on the pre-boot screen.

Once you are done playing you can change these back to the desired settings.

(I haven’t received any step-by-step directions for changing the refresh rate or GSYNC on Mac OS X or Linux systems, but there should be a similar process available. Also, this might not fix the problem for all players, but it should help most of the ones having graphics issues.)